Chapter 15 Salma #2
When we used to hang out after school, Poppy was a font of information, sharing little tidbits and observations.
Once she told me that she heard Betsy Scott tell a fifth-grade boy in her office that he would never amount to anything.
Another time she told me that Tommy comes into the fairy forest and kicks over the fairy houses.
But today she is silent. I wonder how it is at her home these days.
I wonder if she hears things. Perhaps things about me.
I want to ask Poppy if Mamby returned to Chicago, or what happened last night after the Halloween parade, or if she ever sees Mamby watching videos.
I don’t ask. That would cross more boundaries than I can even identify.
“You did a great job with your presentation, Poppy.” This is the first time we’ve been alone since Rainforest Night.
Poppy smiles beatifically.
“I thought you were nervous about public speaking? I couldn’t tell at all.”
“I know. It wasn’t like how I thought it would be.”
“Tell me how it felt.”
Poppy chews her apple contemplatively and then says, “Well, at first I was all tingling, like my stomach was so nervous. And then, after I breathed and looked up, it was just calm. Mawmaw pats Bear’s back when he falls asleep and whispers, ‘Peace, peace,’ and that’s what it felt like. All calm.”
“Wow.”
“Mamby taught me,” she says with pride.
My gut ache on temporary hiatus flares back.
We double-dip our slices of apple in the peanut butter, our knuckles getting stickier. This is the extent of my rebellious streak. Peanut butter in a peanut-butter-free school and double-dipping.
So softly that I question if I’ve heard her properly, Poppy asks, “What does it mean when someone is ‘living in the past’?”
Sometimes she is a mind reader. My usual approach with her is listener.
I do not ask follow-up questions because I don’t want her to retreat or feel self-conscious or even be self-aware that what she’s telling me is news.
I let her speak at her pace. But today, she gives me no more insight into her question.
“It means that someone is having a hard time getting over something.”
It is now 4:30, a full hour since the last bell rang.
Even for Marlene, this is late. Ruby may not know our ritual or how to get into the building after hours.
I never want Poppy to feel unwanted but am also aware that she is just a kid at the end of a long day.
One who is spending her birthday at school with her teacher. “How about I walk you home?”
It has turned cold. I offer Poppy my jacket, but she declines, even though her arms in her short-sleeve shirt are covered in goose bumps.
I put my bag in my trunk and see the flannel blanket Mamoo insisted I keep in my car, along with safety cones and an entire emergency-response kit, replete with flares, in case I’m stranded on my five-minute, city-street commute to work.
“How about we wrap this blanket around you like a cape?” It is pink-and-red plaid with a yellow stripe.
Poppy claps her hands. I fold the blanket on the horizontal edge and dig through my bag for a binder clip to cinch the top. Poppy extends her arms under the blanket and wraps it around herself.
“You look like a girly Dracula.”
She runs to the side door to check herself out in the late-afternoon light and makes toothy Dracula faces at herself and perfects her accent. “Let’s call me Draculina!”
“Ooh, I like that! All right, Draculina, lead the way.”
She picks up a stick and charges with her imaginary sword held high. “Let’s explore on the way.”
“Okay, Draculina Explorer.” We are mixing themes, but what do I care? She’s happy, and we have both caught the scent of an adventure. I carry her backpack and follow her. We walk down a street lined with apartments and duplexes.
I smell onions and garlic and Indian spices cooking and, unwillingly, feel nostalgic. I know I will never taste my mother’s dal again, and even though decades have passed and with the complicated emotions she triggers, I still feel the bite of that loss.
Poppy beats the bushes with her stick and looks up trees.
I, too, search the bases of rocks and fire hydrants for treasures because in the last block, she has now become Draculina Explorer Treasure Finder.
She stops in front of a pretty two-family unit and cocks her head like she hears something.
I hear raised voices, too, but on the tree-lined sidewalk, amid all the old brick buildings, it is hard to tell where the voices are coming from.
“Is this your house?” I ask.
Poppy drops her Draculina persona and, without looking at me, marches up the steps. I follow. Under the front covered patio, the voices coming from the darkened house are clear.
“I’m never enough for you!” a voice screams.
“Ruby. No one is saying that.” Marlene’s voice is slow and calm.
“I know what you think. I see it in how you look at me.”
Marlene says something that I can’t hear.
“You lie! You’re lying to me!”
I would like to leave Poppy in the custody of a loving adult, but that doesn’t seem possible here. I grip her shoulder. As a sign of my own sickness, even though I am immobile, uncertain what to do, I think if I asked Ruby about my sister right now, maybe she would come clean.
“You’re embarrassed . . . Black.”
“What is wrong with you? My children are Black. I don’t have hang-ups around race like you Americans.” Marlene’s accent is strong, and I can tell that she is getting less patient.
I don’t want Marlene to think I let Poppy walk home alone, and at the same time, the loud voices and rawness coming from the house freeze me, unable to knock and unable to leave.
Poppy pulls away from my grasp, opens the screen door, and throws the inner door open.
She flips the lights on in the living room, forcing all eyes to her.
“Mawmaw, you can’t force someone to be your friend.
And, Mamby, even if you don’t like us, you still have to be kind.
” She marches into the interior of the house.
It is then that Marlene and Ruby see me standing on their patio and things start moving in slow motion.
“You! You! You dare come here? I told you to leave my family alone! This is because of you! You and your stupid fucking family!” Ruby screams, her arms extend like she’s encompassing the whole world in my list of failures.
Before I can even make sense of what Ruby’s saying and the meaning of it, Poppy emerges with a diaper bag over her shoulder and Bear in her arms. She strides by me with great confidence and simply says, “It’s time to go.”
I stand motionless watching the two scenes unfold around me in two directions.
Poppy marching down the block as resolutely as she can while holding a remarkably docile eighteen-month-old in her arms that is far too big for her to carry.
Ruby yelling things that don’t make sense.
And then a pot gets thrown. At me? At Marlene?
I don’t know. It is stopped by the screen door, and terra cotta flies everywhere.
The sound of breaking things and the iron smell of dirt, specks of which make their way through the screen and land on my face, arouse me from my stupor.
I run after Poppy and Bear. I have no idea what’s happening inside that house, but it has nothing to do with me.
I worry about Marlene but can’t bother with that now. My job is to protect these children.
By the time we get back to school, I can hear police sirens.
I strap a happily babbling Bear into my car, and we sit there for a while with the heat blowing on our faces from the vents making me nauseated, my legs shaky with adrenaline.
Poppy is in the back seat with her legs pulled up, head buried in her arms, quietly weeping while Bear pats her on the head, saying, “Peas. Peas.”
I drive slowly back to my bungalow in the cloyingly warm car.
There is an animal instinct to protect its young.
In humans, babies’ vitals mirror their mothers’ at birth, and then they spend a lifetime finding their own, learning how to physically and emotionally survive solo.
It is a reflection of a deeper pact. If you are hurt, I will help.
If you are under threat, come find me. But what happens if the parent pretends like the hurt didn’t happen?
What if they are the cause of the threat?
What happens when the adult becomes complicit in the bad act?
Whom is the child supposed to go to then?
Love and acceptance are nice, but defending against harm is the basic building block of life.
It comes back to me then, the last time I saved someone, if you can call it that.
It is the one thing I have never told anyone, even now.
I did not speak it to Mamoo or Aunty in the aftermath.
We were all just fragments then, people that, no matter how meticulously we were glued back together, would never be mistaken for being unbroken.
I have not spoken it out loud to therapists because, really, what is the point? It’s all just history.